The Acceleration of Time paradox may well be a problem of consciousness.

You Can Trigger 'Time Expansion'—Meaning You Can Stretch Seconds and Warp Reality, Scientists Say

Darren Orf

In moments of emergency, super-concentration, or meditation, people report moments of “time expansion experiences,” or TEEs—when time feels to slow down.
Psychologist Steve Taylor has examined these experiences for a decade, and his new book argues that these moments could be altered states of mind that disrupt our normal psychological processes.
This theory helps explain why TEEs can occur in a variety of situations, and not exclusively in survival or fight-or-flight scenarios.

Time isn’t nearly as immutable as it first seems. Ask any astrophysicist, and they’ll likely regale you with mind-bending descriptions of gravity’s effect on space-time (i.e. the more massive the object, the slower time appears to travel around it). Some cosmologists even wonder if entire pockets of the universe—whether filled with galaxies or endless nothing—experience time at different rates.

However, the perception of the speed at which time passes can also vary within our minds. And it’s this mental realm that Steve Taylor—a psychologist at Leeds Beckett University—is exploring in a new paper and a new book called Time Expansion Experiences.

Taylor’s interest in these altered temporal moments—which he calls “time expansion experiences,” or TEEs—began when he and his wife were involved in a car crash back in 2014. “Everything went into slow motion,” Taylor describes in a post on the Leeds Beckett University website. “I looked behind, and the other cars seemed to be moving incredibly slowly, almost as if they were frozen. I felt as though I had a lot of time to observe the whole scene and to try to regain control of the car. I was surprised by how much detail I could perceive.”

Thankfully, the duo emerged from the car crash unscathed (the car, not so much). In the following decade, Taylor began investigating how and why these moments of ultra-slowness manifest, and his research has led him to some pretty interesting conclusions.

In 2020, Taylor analyzed 96 instances as TEEs and found that roughly half of them occurred during accidents, while others took place during sporting events, while in meditation, or during psychedelic experiences. The results were published in the journal The Journal of Humanistic Psychology.

In an article for the website The Conversation, Taylor explained how some of the leading theories behind these time altering states don’t quite grasp the entire breadth of the experiences. One theory believes these moments are the result of the release noradrenaline—essentially the body’s fight or flight mechanism—but this doesn’t explain the mental time dilation of people during moments of intense meditation or concentration. It’s possible that this perception is an evolutionary hack for surviving intense situations, but that still doesn’t explain how they occur outside of life-or-death events.

“[Another] theory is that TEEs aren’t real experiences, but illusions of recollection. In emergency situations, so this theory goes, our awareness becomes acute, so that we take in more perceptions than normal,” Taylor wrote. “These perceptions become encoded in our memories, so that when we recall the emergency situation, the extra memories create the impression that time passed slowly.”

However, Taylor’s findings from people who’ve experienced TEEs indicate that they were able to process thoughts and information much faster than what would be possible under normal circumstances. Instead, Taylor advocates for an idea that these events shift the human mind into an altered state of consciousness. In these moments, we step outside our normal consciousness into what Taylor calls a different “time-world.”

“The sudden shock of an accident may disrupt our normal psychological processes, causing an abrupt shift in consciousness. In sport, intense altered states occur due to what I call ‘super-absorption,’” Taylor wrote.

While the flow of time remains a delicate dance between gravity and space-time, research shows that time can also very much be a state of mind.

He was shot from the right:

By a pro in fatigues.

What’s up, Israel?

Have you been sharing drugs with Jackstar? She’s an ugly, commie dyke and he, seriously, couldn’t crush an empty beer can. The only two countries in the world not to make a deal with Trump: Canada and China. Your allegiances are very telling Canada.